WordUp - kalamu’s words

 

 

TWO TRAINS RUNNING:

BLACK POETRY 1965-2000

(notes towards a discussion & dialogue)

 By Kalamu ya Salaam

 

What is poetry? That is not a rhetorical question. What it is we are discussing? I define poetry as "stylized language." Within the context of what is generally called literature, I further specify that poetry is language stylized to have an emotional impact on its audience. Within the world of English-language poetry, the chief methods of stylization are: 1. meter and/or rhythm 2. the specific use of sound usually in terms of a. rhyme b. assonance/consonance c. alliteration d. onomatopoeia 3. figurative language, chiefly similes and metaphors.

The canonical standards for contemporary American poetry have their beginnings in England with Shakespeare and their most important developments in the modernist movement of the 1920s (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams). The fountain heads of contemporary American poetry are considered to be Walt Whitman and Emily Dickerson.

When we look at black poetry, however, we find another, and equally important, source: namely black speech and music, a distinct and distinguished oral and aural tradition which predates America and stretches back to Africa. These two trains are the twin engines of African American, or what I would prefer to call African Diasporan poetry. Most literary criticism gives short shrift to, and very little critical understanding of, black speech/black music as a source of black poetry. Most literary criticism does not consider that our ancestral mother tongues were tonal languages, which to some non-Africans sound like singing rather than talking.

My argument is that the best use of our language is in fact song. Is song, not sounds like song. And this song essence, this musical emphasis informs what we know as poetry. Indeed, while we may be unique in the degree of our congruity of speech and song, within the context of poetry, the fact is, all poetry, I repeat all poetry, started out as sound rather than text, closer to song than to monotone talking.

Moreover, even the paragon of English poetry, i.e. the work of William Shakespeare (whomever he or she, or they, may have been), even Shakespeare was primarily working in an oral tradition using the vernacular of his day. It is not inappropriate to argue that Shakespeare created the English language as a vehicle for literature. During his day, most literature was written in Latin or French. Shakespeare elevated folk forms and the peasant patois of his era to a literary art form. Shakespeare took the vernacular and created high art.

This brings us to the  Black Arts Movement. I know it probably seems like a major stretch to go directly from Shakespeare to the black arts movement of the 1960s, but if you understand that the effort of the black arts movement was to make art based on the speech and music of black people, drawn from the everyday lives of our people and returned to them in an inspiring and potent form; if you understand that the vernacular was the basis for the development of the art; and if you understand that text was not the singular consideration but rather one of a number of considerations, then you can appreciate the Shakespeares of Harlem, of Watts, of Detroit, Chicago, D.C., so forth and so on. And by the way, this artistic elevation of the vernacular is not limited to Shakespeare and the black arts movement.

This same concern shaped the work of the aforementioned founders and fountain heads of modern American poetry. Indeed, this same phenomenon is evidenced in the work of Homer and particularly in the work of Dante, just to name two very important poets from a global historical perspective. While I acknowledge there are other perspectives and considerations, I nevertheless proffer the theory that what was new about the black arts movement was that we were creating our own path rather than following the paths of others.

I also need to point out that the development of the Black Arts Movement had roots and precedents in earlier movements within black literature, as well as roots from outside the black literary tradition. For a general overview of the black arts movement, I refer you to my essay in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature. For a detailed investigation of the black arts movement, I refer you to my forthcoming book: The Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement.

With that background I will now offer observations for discussion and dialogue. This is not a position paper; this is not an analysis; this is not a summary, but rather is simply a sharing of some ideas and observations toward the development of an assessment of black poetry 1965 to 2000. The black arts movement proper covers the time period of 1965 to 1976. In February 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated and shortly thereafter in March of 1965 a small group of artists and intellectuals coalesced in Harlem to take up work that Malcolm X had outlined in his vision for the Organization of Afro American Unity, the Oaau. Malcolm called for the developed of a cultural center in Harlem.

Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, Askia Muhammad Toure, then Roland Snellings, and numerous others responded directly to this call. It is important to point out that the concept for what became the black arts repertory theatre/school did not originate with Baraka although it was named and actualized by Baraka. The specific thrust came from Malcolm X, who in turn was influenced by the teachings of Elijah Muhammad from whom Malcolm had split and from the whole black nationalist tradition dating back to Garvey in Harlem, a movement which Malcolm had studied intently.

Moreover, although looking at the work of key individuals is extremely important, what is more important is to consider the ideas and institutions, the programs and production that is engendered by individuals in motion during a given era. In this case the black arts era is birthed with the death of Malcolm X and makes it's own transition in 1976 when its three major publishing institutions all, each for different reasons, cease functioning. The three major publishing institutions are Dudley Randall's Detroit-based Broadside Press (which by the way re-emerged and continues to operate today); Johnson publications, Hoyt Fuller editedNegro Digest/Black World; and The Journal of Black Poetry published and edited by Joe Goncalves, aka Dingane. Between these three institutions hundreds of poets were published and over thousands of poems distributed in the Black community of the USA and worldwide.

There has been no comparable output of published poetry by any other movement in the history of America. Negro Digest/Black World, with a circulation over 100,000 was the largest literary magazine in American history. White, black or otherwise. Period. Broadside Press with its poetry books, broadsides, tapes and lps, and short lived though very important series of critical monographs is without precedent as a publisher of American poetry. No other press was as influential in terms of poetry. And finally, although its circulation was not as large, the Journal of Black Poetry which published 19 issues between the mid sixties and the mid seventies, is one of the most vibrant examples of an independently published, non-academic poetry journal in the history of American publishing.

This period also produced three major poetry anthologies: Dudley Randall's The Black Poets, Abraham Chapman's New Black Voices, and Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. Of course, there is also the seminal anthology for the black arts movement, namely Leroi Jones and Larry Neal's Black Fire.

The next major period of black poetry is undefined in terms of a movement per se. This era of retrenchment from the ideals and actualities of black arts poetic production and movement toward, and indeed embracement of, more mainstream modes of poetic production finds its fruition in the work of poet, professor and anthologist Michael Harper. General acclaim given to Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyaaka and to national poet laureate Rita Dove, are both partially the result of the behind the scenes and extremely far reaching work of Michael Harper.

From his position as a professor of creative writing in the graduate program at Brown University, Harper has been able to mentor two generations of poets; champion numerous poets; bring back into print and cause a reassessment of earlier black poets, chiefly Robert Hayden and Sterling Brown; and publish a number of influential poetry anthologies including: every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans since 1945 (published in 1994) and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (published Feb. 2000). During this post-black arts period there has been a virtual proliferation of black poets coming through graduate programs in literature. One might call them mfa poets if it didn't have such an exclusive and exclusionary ring to it.

The fruition of Harper's vision is one of the most important developments of the 90s, namely the Cave Canem grouping of poets led by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eddy. Harper and Cave Canem are all academically-oriented, not exclusively so but in the main that is their orientation, and that means they are most concerned with text. Of course other currents were active during this period, and three of the most important figures in late 20th century poetry production in terms of editing, anthologizing, and championing the work of black poets, are Quincy Troupe, E. Ethlelbert Miller and the head of this crew Dr. Jerry Ward, whose 1997 anthology Trouble the Water-250 Years of African American Poetry is a quintessential embodiment of this viewpoint.

Additionally, from a pedagogic point of view, the most important of what I would term the third stream of modern Black poetry is found in the work of Joanne Gabbin with her furious flower conference and the extensions from that conference that include a four-volume video tape series, an online teacher's guide, an anthology of critical essays, and a forthcoming anthology of poetry.

Furious Flower represents an unparalleled summing up of mid to late 20th century Black poetry. Gabbin's vision embraces both trains of African American aesthetics, the text-oriented and the speech/music oriented, and manages to be both compact and comprehensive while acknowledging the strengths and importance of both schools of African American poetics. 

Here is text and context presented in multimedia appropriate for use in the classroom. The importance of the comprehensive third stream (as exemplified by Gabbin, Miller, Troupe and others) on the one hand and the academic poets (as clustered around Michael Harper and Cave Canem) on the other hand, are both eclipsed by the most recent development in African American poetry, namely the spoken word movement which began to dominate the production of black poetry in the late 1990s.

Watershed events in this regard are the nationally released motion pictures: Love Jones (1997) starring Lorenz Tate and Nia Long, and directed by Theodore Witcher, and Slam (1998) starring Saul Williams and Sonia Sohn and directed by Marc Levin. Although this movement was not started by these movies, these two films are collectively responsible for popularizing what is now the most dynamic movement in black poetry. If there is a watershed event it happened many, many years before: September 1979 with the release of Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang. This was the beginning of rap recordings.

Rap, as an art form, is the single most important influence on Black poetry at the turn of the century. 1. Stressed the vernacular, and therefore was accessible to young people who were otherwise shut out of artistic production and most of whom (but not all) were excluded from higher education, and thus not likely to be directly influenced by the text tradition in a pedagogical way. 2. Had a strong performance orientation which stressed working with a live audience as opposed to a text orientation. 3. Had a commercial base which stressed popularity often to the detriment of development.

Many, many people in the text and some in the third stream camps are extremely critical of the spoken word movement. They make the mistake of focusing on the movement's obvious shortcomings and ignoring the strengths and potentials. (Read Lorenzo Thomas.) Mention Giant Steps by Kevin Young--all the poets included are mfa poets. The spoken word movement is an American movement and not a black poetry movement in that it encompasses blacks, latino/a, asian, indigenous peoples and whites. The black branch has yet to produce major anthologies or recordings, and thus is not easily available for study and teaching in the classroom.

Major figures of this movement on the black side include: Patricia Smith, Tracie Morris, Roger Bonair-Agard, Reggie Gibson and Staceyann Chin among many, many others. There will be a proliferation of work in this regard arriving soon. There has yet to be an anthology (which will necessarily have to include a cd) that exemplifies this movement. I have not touched on, but do want to mention the whole jazzpoetry movement, championed by Jayne Cortez, Sekou Sundiata, Kamau Daaood and yours truly. This movement works to bring together black speech and black music into a unified artistic whole. Each of the aforementioned have recordings that exemplify their work.

Finally, I want to end with a challenge: 1. Bring back Bam’s  major works Black Fire and Understanding the New Black Poetry, now out of print. If the books were being used in the classroom, they would still be in print. 2. Encourage students to study BAM and study spoken word the way we encourage (by the example of the books we write, authors we assign, and texts we canonize) the study of the Harlem Renaissance. 3. Put together a journal dedicated to the publication and critique of black poetry and black poetics. This activity could be expanded into websites, listservs, cd roms, videos, audio cds and the like. Which institution, which individuals will take the lead in the study and development of Black poetry? 

The further development of Black poetry is what is to be done.

*   *   *   *   *

>via: http://nathanielturner.com/whatisblackpoetry.htm

 

 

NINA SIMONE

 

Nina is song. Not just a vocalist or singer, but actual song. The physical vibration and the meaning too. A reflection and projection of a certain segment of our mesmerizing ethos. Culturally specific in attitude, in rhythm, in what she harmonizes with and what she clashes against, merges snugly into and hotly confronts in rage. All that she is. Especially the contradictions and contrarinesses. And why not. If Nina is song. Our song. She would have to be all that.

 

Nina is not her name. Nina is our name. Nina is how we call ourselves remade into an uprising. Eunice Waymon started out life as a precocious child prodigy -- amazingly gifted at piano. She went to church, sang, prayed and absorbed all the sweat of the saints: the sisters dropping like flies and rising like angels all around her. Big bosoms clad in white. Tambourine-playing, cotton-chopping, tobacco-picking, corn-shucking, floor-mopping, child-birthing, man-loving hands. The spray of sweat and other body secretions falling on young Eunice's face informing her music for decades to come with the fluid fire of quintessential Black musicking. But there was also the conservatory and the proper way to approach the high art of music. The curve of the hands above the keyboard. The ear to hear and mind to understand the modulations in and out of various keys. The notes contained in each chord. She aspired to be a concert pianist. But at root she was an obeah woman. With voice and drum she could hold court for days, dazzle multitudes, regale us with the splendor, enrapture us with the serpentine serendipity of her black magic womanistness articulated in improvised, conjured incantations. "My daughter said, mama, sometimes I don't understand these people. I told her I don't understand them either but I'm born of them, and I like it." Nina picked up Moses' writhing rod, swallowed it and now hisses back into us the stories of our souls on fire. Hear me now, on fire.

 

My first memory of Nina is twofold. One that music critics considered her ugly and openly said so. And two that she was on the Tonight show back in the late fifties/very early sixties singing "I Love You Porgy." Both those memories go hand in hand. Both those memories speak volumes about what a Black woman could and could not do in the Eisenhower era. They called her ugly because she was Black. Literally. Dark skinned. In the late fifties, somewhat like it is now, only a tad more adamant, couldn't no dark skinned woman be pretty. In commercial terms, the darker the uglier. Nina was dark. She sang "Porgy" darkly. Made you know that the love she sang about was the real sound of music, and that Julie Andrews didn't have a clue. Was something so deep, so strong that I as a teenager intuitively realized that Nina's sound was both way over my head and was also the water within which my soul was baptized. Which is probably why I liked it, and is certainly why my then just developing moth wings sent me shooting toward the brilliant flashes of diamond bright lightening which shot sparking cobalt blue and ferrous red out of the black well of her mouth. This was some elemental love. Some of the kind of stuff I would first read about in James Baldwin's Another Country, a book that America is still not ready to understand. Love like that is what Nina's sound is.

 

Her piano was always percussive. It hit you. Moved you. Socked it to you. She could hit one note and make you sit up straight. Do things to your anatomy. That was Nina. Made a lot of men wish their name was Porgy. That's the way she sang that song. I wanted to grow up and be Porgy. Really. Wanted to grow up and get loved like Nina was loving Porgy. For a long time, I never knew nobody else sang that song. Who else could possibly invest that song with such a serious message, serious meaning? Porgy was Nina's man. Nina's song. She loved him. And he was well loved.

 

In my youth, I didn't think she was ugly. Nor did I didn't think she was beautiful. She just looked like a dark Black woman. With a bunch of make-up on in the early days. Later, I realized what she really looked like was an African mask. Something to shock you into a realization that no matter how hard you tried, you would never ever master white beauty because that is not what you were. Fundamental Blackness. Severe lines. Severe, you hear me. I mean, you hear Nina. Dogonic, chiseled features. Bold eyes. Ancient eyes. Done seen and survived slavery eyes. A countenance so serious that only hand carved mahogany or ebony could convey the features.

 

The hip-notism of her. The powerful peer. Percussive piano. Pounding pelvis. The slow, unhurried sureness. An orgasm that starts in the toes and ends up zillions of long seconds later emanating as a wide-mouthed silent scream uttered in some sonic range between a sigh and a whimper. A coming so deep, you don't tremble, you quake. I feel Nina's song and think of snakes. Damballa undulations. Congolesian contractions. She is an ancient religion renewed. The starkness of resistance. And nothing Eurocentric civilization can totally contain. Dark scream. Be both the scream and the dark. A crusty fist shot straight up in the air, upraised head. Maroon. Runaway. No more auction block. The one who did not blink when their foot was cut off to keep them from running away. And they just left anyway. Could stand before the overseer and not be there. Could answer drunken requests to sing this or that love song and create a seance so strong you sobered up and afterwards reeled backward, pawing the air cause you needed a drink. You could not confuse Nina Simone with some moon/june, puritan love song. Nina was the sound that sent slave masters slipping out of four posted beds and roaming through slave quartered nights. Yes, Nina was. And was too the sound that sent them staggering back with faces and backs scratched, teeth marked cheeks, kneed groins, and other signs of resistance momentarily tattooed on their pale bodies. And despite her fighting spirit, or perhaps because of her fighting spirit, the strength and ultra high standard of femininity she established with her every breath, these men who would be her master would not sell her. Might whip her a little, but not maim her. Well, nothing beyond cutting the foot so she would stay. With Nina it could get ugly if you came at her wrong, and something in her song said any White man approaching with intentions of possessing me is wrong. Nina sounded like that. Which is why this anti-fascist German team wrote "Pirate Jenny" and it was a long, long time before I realized that the song wasn't even about Black people.

 

Nina Simone was/is something so potent, so fascinating. A fertile flame. A cobra stare. Once you heard her, you could not avoid her, avoid the implications of her sound, be ye Black, White or whatever. Her blackness embraced the humanity in all who heard her, who experienced being touched by her, whose eyes welled up with tears sometimes, feeling the panorama of sensations she routinely but not rotely evoked wherever, whenever she sat at the altar of her piano and proceeded to unfurl the spiritual history of her people. When Nina sang, sings, if you are alive, and hear her, really hear her, you become umbilicaled into the cosmic and primal soul of suffering and resurrection, despair and hope, slavery and freedom that all humans have, at one level or another, both individually and ethnically, experienced, even if only vicariously. After all, who knows better the range of reactions to the blade, than does the executioner who swings the axe?

 

Nina hit you in the head, in the heart, in the gut and in the groin. But she hit you with music, and thus her sonorous fusillades, even at their most furious, did you no harm. In fact, the resulting outpouring of passions was a healing. A lancing of sentimental sacs which held the poisons of oppressive tendencies, the biles of woe-filled self-pity. A draining from the body of those social toxicants which embitter one's soul. A removal of the excrescent warts of prejudice and chauvinism that blight one's civil make-up.

 

Sangoma Simone sang and her sound was salving and salubrious. Her concerts were healing circles. Her recordings medicinal potions. She gave so much. Partaking of her drained you of cloying mundanities. Poured loa-ed essentials into the life cup. You left her presence, filled to your capacity and aware of how much there was to achieve by being a communicative human being.

 

Nina Simone. Supper clubs could not hold her. Folk songs were not strong enough. Popular standards too inane. Even though she did them. Did them to death. Took plain soup, and when she finished adding her aural herbs, there you had gumbo. Nina hit her stride with the rebellious uprises of the sixties, and the fierce pride of the seventies. Became a Black queen, an African queen. Became beautiful. Remember, I am talking about a time when we really believed Black was beautiful. Not just ok, acceptable, nothing to be ashamed of, but beautiful. Proud. And out there. Not subdued. Not refined. Not well mannered. But out there. Way out. Like Four Women. Like Mississippi Goddamn. Like Young, Gifted And Black. Like Revolution. Like: "And I Mean Every Word Of It". This was Nina who did an album with only herself. Voice. Piano. And some songs that commented on the human condition in terms bolder than had ever been recorded in popular music before. Are we The Desperate Ones? Have We Lost The Human Touch?

 

My other memories of Nina have to do with the aftermath. I recall the aridness of counterrevolutionary America clamping down and shuttering the leading lights of the seventies. Nina's radiance was celestial, but oh my, how costly the burning. Seeking fuel she fled into exile. Who would be her well, where could she find a cool drink of water before she died?

 

Then, like indiscreet body odors, the rumors and gossip began floating back. The tempest. The turning in on the self. What happens when they catch you and bring you back. Reify and commodify you, relegate you back into slavery. You are forced to fight in little and sometimes strange ways. But the thrill is gone. Cause only freedom is thrilling, and ain't no thrill in being contained on anybody's plantation, chained to anybody's farm. Anybody's, be they man, woman or child. Nobody's. Nothing thrilling about not being liberated.

 

Nina, like most of us, went crazy so that she could stay sane. Just did it hard. Was a more purer crazy. Cause she had so much to be sane about. So much that leeches wanted to siphon, sip, suck.

 

How do you stay sane in America? You go crazy. In order to be.

 

To be proud. And beautiful. And woman. And dark. Black skinned. You have to go crazy to stay sane. You have to scream, just to make room for your whispers. You have to cry and cuss, so that you can kiss and love. You have to fight. Fight. Fight. Lord. Fight. I gets. Fight. So tired. Fight. Of. Fight. Fighting all the time. But ooohhh child things are gonna get easier.

 

Don't tell me about her deficiencies, or her screwed up business affairs, her temper tantrums, her lack of understanding, her bad luck with men, her walking off the stage on the audience. Don't tell me about nothing. None of that. Because all of that ain't Nina. Nina Simone is song. And all of that is just whatever she got to do. Like she said: Do What You Got To Do. Oh Lord, Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

 

I play Nina Simone. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. This morning. Tonight at noon. Under the hot sun of Amerikkka, merrily, merrily, merrily denigrating us. In those terrible midnights. I play Nina Simone. Just to stay sane. Stay Black. To remember that Black is beautiful, not pretty. Beautiful is more than pretty. Beautiful is deep. I play beautiful Nina Simone. Nina Song. I play Nina Simone. And whether Nina's song turns you off or Nina's song turns you on, whose problem, whose opportunity is that?

 

No. Let me correct the English. I don't play Nina Simone. I serious Nina Simone. Serious. Simone. Put on her recordings and Nzinga strut all night long. And even that is not long enough.

 

To be young, or ancient. Gifted, or ordinary. But definitely Black, definitely the terrible beauty of Blackness. Nina Simone. Nina Song. Nina. Nina. Nina.

 

Oh my god. I give thanx for Nina Simone.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

BOTH WATER & BRIDGES

 

(for Staceyann in the space/time continuum)

a fear expressed is a fear reduced
don't let anxieties about the future, curdle 
the sweet of tasting in the present 

every "now" has its own joys, its own 
sorrows. every lived moment is now. it is 
not the water but the bridge that ages 

precisely because the water is 
constantly renewing... and so, keep running
be water, renew and run, run and renew and

where ever, whom ever you touch, build
build bridges, links, one to the other
whomsoever the other is, we should create

a crossing, a way to connect, a bridge
built by each of us to the other of us
as we flow on and follow our own paths

and so to be whole is to be both:
be water constantly running
be bridges constantly built

life is motion/movement. keep going. 
share the beauty of your flowing, the beauty
of your bridges connecting everywhere 

howsoever old you grow, share your beauty, 
build more bridges. be both water and
bridge, flow & connection—a luta continua...

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

…AND RAISE BEAUTY TO

ANOTHER LEVEL OF SWEETNESS

 

You are a fresh flower

bursting boldly

into a hard world

with a softness

strong as steel

 

Reaching for sunlight

you raise yourself

up from down under

out of the degrading dirt

society has so routinely

dumped on women,

you have transformed

manure, muck and mire

into fertilizer

 

Spring self assertedly

past winter weather

you bring a sweet fragrant

incense and inspiration

into musty places

stale with the stuffiness

of misogynic sexist

status quos

 

You blossom, you bloom

you expand and grow

raising beauty

to a bedazzling higher

and healthier level of

light, life and love

 

Grow on Black rose

Black woman grow on!

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

Govern Yrself Accordingly

 

i have dismissed

the minister

of emotional defenses,

distributed

confetti to all

the guards and given

faithful and ever vigilant

caution

several days off

 

the city

of me is well ready

to joyously receive and

rainbow celebrate

your unanticipated but

nonetheless profoundly appreciated

arrival into the intimacy

of our space

 

know that you are warmly

welcomed for howsoever long

you should choose to stay

here, you need no keys

no door is locked to you

every window is open

 

feel free 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

 

Be About Beauty

 

be about beauty

as strong as a flower is

yet as soft too

as an open petal

receiving the mist

of a midnight raindrop,

be about beauty

no matter life's dirt

be about beauty

 

—Kalamu ya Salaam

creative quilt by Adrienne Cruz (http://www.adrienecruz.com)

__________________________

  

 

 

"The art I create fulfills a powerful desire to express visually what's not easily spoken. I am moved by a passion for color, a love of symbols, and a deep interest in matters of the Spirit. Blending these elements keeps the rhythms of my roots alive by acknowledging the gifts of my ancestors, angels, and spirit guides. The power of art, beyond its visual image, is developed over time - born of the spirit, of roots, and the celebration of survival.

"I welcome you to journey through this site for a taste of my world of art as meditation, a great source of joy and peace I share with you. May your spirit be lifted and inspired! Thank you for visiting."                Adriene Cruz 

Life should be Beauty, Magic and Joy
Smile, love, laugh and laugh some more
Our birthright is to know joy and experience pleasure
A spirit fueled with joy is charged and ready to go about the work we’re here to do.

It’s true we won’t always be happy or even feel good.

The challenge is managing to remember our birthright when the burdens get us down. Transform grief to beauty and dream something wonderful. 

In my life, the experience of love and beauty has been the best medicine for elevating a beat down spirit. As in the beauty of … 
A smile 
Good music Dancing, dancing, dancing
Travel to new and familiar places
Forgiveness
Understanding
The love a support of family and friends
Children laughing
Kind words
Working out
My happy dog
Faith infused with courage
Selfless giving
Love, love, love
Flowers, trees, sunsets, walks by the river, a moonlit sky, and all the wonders of nature’s abundance …
The beauty of finding magic in everyday life
To have magic in our lives is to remember it’s real, profound and sacred. Enjoy! 

For generations, the women in Adriene Cruz' family have been sewing and designing clothing. A native of Harlem, New York, Adriene attended the High School of Art and Design, then the School of Visual Arts graduating with a BFA. In those years Adriene worked in wood sculpture, often with fiber elements, and gradually the fibers, especially tapestry crochet, became her primary focus, linking her art more directly to those traditions in her family.

 

In 1983, Cruz moved to Portland, Oregon, where a quilting course at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts reinvigorated her artwork. Since then, she has been creating brilliantly colored and adorned quilts, piecing together richly patterned materials in rhythmic arrangements that are stately as well as exuberant, structured as well as improvisational, deeply moving on a spiritual level as well as simply enjoyable for their sheer beauty.

The resonant depths of these works arise from many factors: the relationship of the materials to Adriene’s ancestry; the warmth and comfort; the powers and symbolic qualities of cowrie shells, mirrors, and talismans; the artist's ability to connect viewers to the rhythms, shapes, and patterns of abundant life

Adriene's gifted use of color and design has also garnered attention for public art in the Portland community. She has created street banners and painted murals, and created the installation art for the Killingsworth Light Rail Station using glass concrete and steel. In addition to museum exhibits nationwide, Adriene has been featured in numerous books and publications.

CONTACT INFORMATION: Adriene may be reached by email.

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

NINE NEW ORLEANS HAIKU

 

 

French Quarter Intimacies

 

through weathered wood dark

on shadowed streets ancient voices

whisper history

 

   * * *

New Orleans Rainbow

 

from buttered gold to

purpled black, the sundry shades

of my people shine

 

    * * *

Our Natures Rise

 

hard core nights are so

erotic, a whiff of the

breeze is narcotic

 

    * * * 

Sunrise On The River

 

shy dawn tenderly

gold tongue kisses the rippling

river's flowing face

 

   * * * 

Quarter Moon Rise

 

soft moon shimmers out

of cloudy dress, stirred by night's

suggestive caress

 

    * * *

All Nite Long

 

amid dancing &

drinking til dewed dawn, nights stretch

24 hours long

 

    * * *

The Spice Of Life

 

cayenne in our blood

we dance, eat, laugh, cry & love

with peppered passion

 

    * * * 

St. Louis Cemetery Crypt

 

bones float in raised stone,

white, altared graves, blood transformed,

become black souled thrones

 

    * * *

Makes You Go Oohhh!

 

sing of lusty foods

so savory they buck jump

cross your tongue's dance floor

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

AND THEN THEY LAUGHED

 

SCENE ONE.

 

—Places, everybody.

 

 A somber, chartreuse funk deftly settles expectantly into the cushions of the wicker sofa right between John and Angela.  Scooting its ass back deep into the throw pillows with the oriental scenes embroidered on them, looking from left to right, back and forth, checking out first the woman and then the man, the woman, the man, and greedily anticipating a rousing good fight, funk's emerald eyes were shinning with a scintillating brilliance.

 

 —Rolling.

 

(If you were John right now you would be wondering why this woman was being so hard on you, calling your cards marked, your dealing cheat, throwing her hand to the floor, turning the table over and screaming about the sins of gambling.

(If you were Angela right now you would be wondering why do men make you treat them so hard, why do they take a woman who sleeps by herself for some kind of rainbow trout to be caught with hook words, split open, gutted, fried, seasoned with dollops of hot sauce, and eaten with relish leaving only bones and a shriveled head on the otherwise bare plate.

(If you were John you would be tired of this shit.)

(If you were Angela you would be tired of this shit.)

 

 —Action!

 

Funk knows that the fun part about this prime time drama is that an argument doesn't have to be about anything real to make a good show, it just has to be emotional.

 

Once (a year to the day after their first date—she reminded him she had to remind him!) Angela wanted to talk about their future in the third quarter of a close game. 

Another time (about six months after he moved in) she wanted to discuss bills, 11:38 at night. 

Then there was the time they had just finished eating (at that time they hadn't even discussed living together) and John had even volunteered to wash dishes and Angela wanted to stand next to him rinsing the dishes and asking him questions about what he did with his dick.  With suds half way up to his elbows, John couldn't care less about what she put between her legs when he wasn't there so why, as he washed dirty dishes, did she care about who all he saw or why he wanted to sleep with a woman who wasn't her, shit, maybe the bitch was fine.  He even wiped the beige enamel top of the stove clean and wrung out the well used (three holes and frayed edges) dishrag.

But though he cleaned the kitchen well, John had neither clue nor key to unlocking the deep concern he had for Angela which was incarcerated inside his size 47 1/2" expanded chest.  John's maturity, but a seed yearning for spring, was winter blocked by acquired emotions and ignorantly assumed stances that always seemed to missile guide the first words out his mouth -- maximum overkill syllables designed to destroy all vestiges of life.  John sincerely believed you had to be finger quick on the button push or else the other person's ICBMs would blow you away.

Angela, on the other hand was visibly shaken, quietly close to crying.  Though she knew without a doubt when she was being fucked with, Angela was completely ignorant of what was happening inside of John, and, based on her ignorance and the stupid things John said and seemed to do with periodic regularity, Angela assumed the worst.  When the ground moves rapidly you don't have to be a seismologist to know it's an earthquake.

It wasn't personal, there were many different Angelas and Johns tussling with this same bear.  Is there something in the air that makes it so hard now a days?

"I don't know, maybe we, maybe I should be alone." Self-rejection didn't even sound like her voice. John was well enough equipped to interpret the no trespass termination inherent in the dangerous-colored, slicing sharp, concertina barbed wire gradually unraveling out of the cotton softness of her sound.

 "I don't understand what you want out of this." A torrent of cold, quick darting lizards fell into his lap. Well, he didn't want to always be on trial, that was for sure. She was smelling up the air. Wasn't she woman enough to say it straight out if she really didn't want him anymore? Every inch of her body was covered. After loosening the reptiles, Angela looked like she was headed underground. John flinched and moved back an inch or two in distaste, although he didn't know he was moving back.

Angela saw the small movements of his flesh which portended major emotional shifts. She foresaw his big feet walking out the door. His green shirt turning sundown forest dark as he slammed the door behind him without speaking or saying any kind of goodbye other than the finality of his olive drab silence.

Angela saw John's muscular back hovering over Crystal's nakedness and sensed his delight in being inside of Crystal. He had someone else (even though he swore that "it" was over, Angela had seen:

(how Crystal eyed John when they had gone to the mayor's inaugural reception and Crystal was allegedly working the room for the mayor and had shook John's hand two beats too long and had barely, limp-wrist offered Angela only the top half of her fingers in a half-hearted gesture that was supposed to pass for a sisterly greeting,

(and, besides, Angela was neither blind nor vain, there was no way Angela's lanky leanness could even come close to any one of Crystal's eye-popping curves—not that John ever publicly gave Angela any reason to feel jealous but still every woman knows when a former girlfriend and potential lifetime rival is the kind of fine that every man wants to fuck,

(and besides Crystal looked like she always got her man, plus anybody else's man she wanted,

(and Angela, even though she hated herself for hating Crystal, well not really hating Crystal but rather hating Crystal's body, hating that Crystal had that kind of body that other women can't help hating because it made a woman feel, well, feel inadeq… ah, uncomfortable, especially if one was a little overweight, or a lot, or a little underweight, or a lot, or just a little skinny—like Angela was—or whatever,

(Angela really didn't want to dwell on how thin her thighs were,

(Angela must have been the only woman in the world who "loss" weight after having a baby,

(and Angela never could find a really pretty hairstyle to complement the long oval shape of her face—what shade of lipstick was that Crystal was wearing?—shit,

(Angela could understand why former-collegiate-all star quarterback John was attracted to Crystal who, even at thirty something, looked preppy as a goddamn college cheerleader,

(well, at least I'm taller—not quite up to John's 6'3" but at least 6" taller—than she is, is what Angela rationalized to console herself when Crystal brushed pass John for the third time in less than two hours,

(Angela was tired, if John wanted that—and there was no doubt in Angela's mind that "that" was waiting by the phone to call John the minute John walked out of Angela's door and was fully able to avail himself of the various female options lined up waiting for a chance to do what Angela had not been able to do,

(oh la-dee-dah, if it was going to be all this then let him go to Crystal, men always had someone else…) to be inside of and she had no one else she wanted inside of her.

Angela wanted to want John, but considering how everything was turning out, at that moment she didn't want him inside of her again ever, no matter how good it felt and it did feel good most of the time, but, so what, no matter, she could handle missing him, missing it. It would be hard but the way to deal with a snake is to cut its head off, don't delay, don't play, don't hesitate.

"John, please leave."

 

—Cut!

 

Funk lay back exhausted but utterly thrilled, marveling at the depth of Angela's self-depreciating workout. Even thought that thing with Crystal had been over two years ago, Angela made that stale episode live again. God, she was good. The crying bit in the next scene was going to be a snap.

Angela was glumly biting her lower lip, which she always did when the stress became a bit much. And John had just dummied all the way down, had not said a word as he did a mental inventory of what were the downsides to cutting his losses and booking up soon as this next scene was through—damn, she had said "please leave" just like she meant it, all soft and shit and with just enough resolve to make it razor sharp, soft but sharp, how did she do that?

Funk could hardly wait for scene two.

 

 

SCENE TWO.

 

—Take it from the dialogue. Speed?

 

—Speed.

 

—Action.

"John, please leave."        

 John had his directions backwards.  When he should have been moving forward he had backed up, now he was reaching out for her with his snakes outstretched. Like he was trying to capture something.

He noticed that she was wearing the silver earrings he had bought her. She could keep them. He wouldn't ask her for them back.  Nor the red suede shoes or the orangish Kenyan woven handbag. Or the three hundred twenty-five he had "loaned" her. "This is a loan, not a gift," spouting mixed signals. He knew when he wrote that check that he wasn't going to see that money again. He never meant to see it. John only meant for Angela to be in his debt.

She stood up.

Vultures were on the roof. Patient.

Angela knew nothing stays fresh forever but must all flesh rot so quickly? Was this cancer or murder? 

She looked up and the jury was glumly filing in.

Wes had beat her twice. The first time he just knocked her down

and if they had not been living in Houston

and if she had not had a baby who was five months old

and if she had not been so young

and if she hadn't just made up her mind to make it work

and if her Honda didn't have thirty-seven more payments

and if Wes hadn't been tearfully pleading, his knees scraping the mauve, stain-resistant Dupont carpet on the floor of their three bedroom dream/nightmare house, his pale blue linen-shirted arms encircling her thighs, not caring about how he must have looked, singing an Al Green beg about how sorry he was

and we're going to make it

and I'll never ever hit you again,

and if her mother had not just gone back home after staying five weeks helping with the baby,

and if she were not up for a promotion at Xerox,

maybe she would have left then and there,

and thus, never would have gotten slapped a second time and ended up going off on his ass, pouring a whole pot of just cooked spaghetti down his back and grabbing a long, long kitchen knife when he started to move at her, remembering the way her jaw had hurt for five and a half days after he had knocked her down that first time and then promising herself, like a Jew viewing relics of the holocaust for the first time, "Never again. Never again."

She had told John this story. He knew not to hit her.

 

Look at her she thinks I'm going to hit her. John couldn't help his thought process; his Negro male ego, having successfully gnawed through the rope holding the door, was now fully uncaged and roaming the streets of John's emotions. A well chewed human dove's feathers warmly covered the bellicose, blood stained jowls of John's unfettered ego.

This was a strange ass woman.

This was an ordinary male.

Nothing prepared him for living with something he couldn't control. All his examples were wrong. He had never seen any of his peers treat a woman like their new car and really take care of her. From what all he knew about women John would bet the farm that if you didn't watch out they had a secret way to make a man cry, and what man wanted to cry?

 

"John, please leave."

"John, please leave."

"John, please leave."

If she didn't stop saying that he was going to have to punch her out.

"John, please leave."

 

Regardless of what John thought he was hearing, after saying it the first time, Angela had not said another word.

At a moment when it would have taken a whole lot of understanding or at least the image of some man John respected advising John on the manliness of admitting confused emotions and admitting to being lost on the relationships frontier, John pushed on confident as Custer that he could cope with whatever Angela had in mind. On the wide screen Eddie Murphy (whom John mistook for an experienced navigator/scout) was acting the fool, his manic guffaws misdirecting John. It made sense to John.

John had watched tv football.  He knew what was happening. A fatal loop of instant replay was stuck in John's head. Angela was standing over John's quarterback, pointing an outstretched finger into the poor boy's face. Actually she was standing astraddle him doing the Cabbage Patch over his prostrate body. How did that look on Monday night television, a sack on his fifteen, and she jumping up, standing one foot on each side of his hip, "take that motherfucker, take that motherfucker!"?

"On who?  On you!" that finger with the blood red fingernail kept saying.  About thirty-six million people was watching her knock him flat on his ass and then gloating with a long red finger in his face!

"John, please leave."

Where were his blockers?

"John, please leave."

Five minutes passed like that.

"John, please leave."

Although there was always another game, who wanted to lose like this?

Angela didn't want to repeat herself. Once was enough. What she really wanted was to disappear. She also wanted her little girl Harriet to grow up in another kind of country where she wouldn't be expected to be some man's woman. If there was such a country, Angela's daughter Harriet could be happy. She could have children if she wanted to. Could have a lover, if she found one she wanted, but she wouldn't have to be "his" woman. That's what she wanted.

John was leaning against the podium wondering what he was supposed to be doing. He didn't know how to talk his way out of this one. Worse than that, he didn't even know he was not trapped in something that he had to escape. The microphone was on, the tape recorders were documenting, the reporters had their pens ready to scribble down every word of the post-game, wrap up.

John was almost forty. He had seen a lot of shit. He had been with a lot of women -- well, without really counting closely, he had been with seven, uh eight women in some kind of serious, well, almost serious, well like he had lived with (more or less) four different women in the last seven years and almost got married twice. He was tired.

He was also unreconstructed. He didn't know how to disarm. How to divest of the need to own. John was afraid to let go and afraid to hold on to a woman's inquiry into his guts. John's EWAD (Early Warning Defensive Radar System) went bonkers -- Angela was set to launch fifty questions. His ego was asking him why did it have to go back in the cage. There was no logical answer.

And Angela, his sweet, sweet angel, had her own pack of troubles to tote, she couldn't help him with his. Besides she was no expert on safe cracking, there was no way for her to reach into his head or even if she could, how could she know his head was not what most needed reprogramming.

How does it happen that you can get to someplace but you can't go back to where you came from? How does it happen that you long for something you ain't never had? Something dim but very valuable was in the distance and they both were reaching for it, but it was far off, far off. Very far off.

John decided he was too tired to talk but really his problem was he couldn't read the script. All he knew was English, albeit at a first year college reading level, thank you; English, a language severly limited in conjunctions and in nouns denoting inner realities. John had fifty-seven ways to express anger and only two words that he knew of that seemed to fit this puzzle. He didn't even know sign language. He had his arms folded.

Angela was deeply hurt by John's refusal to unknot himself, but she was determined. She had journeyed to the crossroads at midnight many times before. Sometimes confused, perplexed and in a quandary, Angela had simply sat on her rump and stoically greeted the dawn. He never met her there; one usual lie was that you had to go to the crossroads alone, but if two was one then being together was alone, right? Sometimes, just marching on down the highway, she would catch a reflection of her moon-shadow on the roadside and realize how doofus she was being by courting the devil behind the particular simpleton in whose hands she was considering placing her life, and invariably on such occasions when even a little sliver of a moon would throw a sharply defined shadow sprawling across the gravel, invariably those would be the times when she knew that the particular man was not worth the particular effort, so even before getting to the crossroads she would back down and return home, would tell Alfred, or whatever his name happened to be in this particular incarnation, "This is not going to make it."

Angela had become strong enough to resist jumping in the water just because a swimming pool was conveniently near, clean and available. Once she had gone right, got married to Westley Richardson, II, Esquire. Blood turned out to be an excellent lawyer, the natural profession of liars. And once she had gone left and not married Julius James Johnson, the man all his friends and acquaintances affectionately called J.J., even though returning the rings and canceling everything damn near broke his heart, Angela knew that was better than going through with getting hooked up to a plow she was not prepared to pull. By then Angela had learned to listen to her stomach which invariably got upset at the way J.J. treated women, and Angela didn't take it personally because the fool was even hard on his mama which was a sign clearer than that storm God dropped on Noah that things wasn't going to work out. Yes Lord, Angela had been to the crossroads.

At the crossroads anything you did had its ups and downs but, based on the lessons life had smacked hard into her head, for sure it was better to walk than wait, "Let's just end this now before one of us hurts the other."

 

—Cut.

 

Of the three, predictably, Funk was the only one not hurting: Don't stop now. Keep the action going while it's flowing. (You know Funk is a midget and likes to drag everybody down to its level.)

Angela was so into the scene she didn't hear the director yell "cut." Even though there was this tremble in her voice, somehow, she was still holding her head up and keeping her face dry, even though a floodtide was raging just behind the brown damn of her determined-not-to-cry eyes.

Funk knew it would be a waste of tears if Angela didn't cry until after John booked up. Funk decided to take matters in hand and started whispering the name of every man who had ever fucked and left Angela. Wait a minute, Funk thought, that's a redundancy of the first order. Everybody Angela ever slept with was gone—well, of course, she had put a couple of them out, but they were gone, and hence, had left. It wouldn't be long now before she jumped to the grand conclusion that going to bed with a dude wasn't nothing but a prelude to the man leaving her. Funk liked the symmetry of that: getting laid was a prelude to getting left—how they said it? Wham, bam…

 

 

SCENE THREE.

 

(Do a slow-mo, three sixty shot.)

 

—Action.

 

John stood up. Turned slowly to walk out the room. And then, inexplicably paused. His back was to Angela. She wasn't looking. His voice stopped his feet from moving. He was shaken by what he heard himself uttering. He couldn't even look at her and say it. The words had thorns and ripped his lips as they poured out. Deep inside him he faintly heard something cursing at him. The mumble was the muffled indignation of his ego protesting confinement.

But there was also a warm light beckoning through the fog. John could hear its slow blinking, an E major seventh chord with a husky Ben Webster whisper, only John didn't consciously know Ben Webster's sound so he could only recognize it in his subconscious having stored it deep in his memory cells when he was a child and his parents were playing Duke Ellington's "In A Mellowtone" RCA album with the 1940 Ellington orchestra's rendition of "All Too Soon" or the 1942 "What Am I Here For," both of which featured Ben in all his majestic glory. Although John could not have called Ben Webster's name to save his life, Ben Webster's sound was the singular touchstone that kept John from making a total fool out of himself and walking out the door.

When John had first heard Ben Webster his mama and daddy were dancing in the front room and he was hanging over the side of a tub they had put him in to keep him from crawling around, and they were speaking some funny language that John did not remember sounding like the language he later learned to speak by mimicking them. That sound that was blinking like a beacon inside of him. He wanted to be his daddy dancing. He wanted Angela in his arms. He wanted to hear Ben Webster again. But he felt awful stupid. He had hugged a lot of women before. But none of the others made music in him and suddenly like a baby, all he wanted was what he wanted, nothing more, nothing less, don't give him no other arms, he wanted his mama, he wanted Angela to be his mama and he wanted to be his daddy.

But just like John didn't consciously know Ben Webster, he also didn't consciously know what he wanted. Which didn't make John feel better; actually, not knowing what he wanted made him feel worse. Meanwhile John's feet stayed rooted to the carpet. E major 7th. He could hear it but he couldn't think it. John didn't think his inability to leave was right, in fact he felt down right weak. If Angela had been hugging him at that moment and had had her head resting on his chest, she would have heard a faint grunt, an involuntary exclamation that acknowledged that at least John knew exactly what Stevie Wonder meant when he sang "There's something 'bout your love..." da-da-da something "...that makes me weak, and knocks me off (pause) my feet."  Even though Stevie was blind, Stevie had peeped this, so maybe, John having all his faculties of sight intact, just maybe, this was the right thing to do. Or something. Maybe being weak was right. John was barely passing his first lesson in submission to human love.

But Angela wasn't looking. When John had stood up, she thought that was it, blood was about to do the famous fifty yard dash right on out of the danger of relating to a female other than his mama.

Angela was deeply hurt by what she interpreted as John's refusal to speak in the mother tongue rather than growl in the colonial language. His silence handcuffed her, and him. She started to nickname him Cortez. Made love with his boots on. Saw her indigenous femininity as virgin territory to be mounted, surmounted, claimed and controlled, a phallic flag stuck into with its nuts waving in the wind. Thinking of love like a business: what he could gain, what he stood to lose. Angela was really tired, at that moment, so she didn't hear him stop, desert the armed forces, and of course she didn't hear that E major 7th, nor the Ben Webster buzz. But what she did hear, she didn't believe at first, even though she had been wanting to believe.

"Angela. I don't know what to do. I'm scared of you. But, I love you."

 

—Cut.

 

Funk was furious. What a revolting development this was. Funk was sure that shit wasn't in the script.

After checking the newly revised script, Funk was even further dismayed to find out that Funk was eliminated entirely from the last scene.

Don't tell me you're going to shoot some lame-ass, happily-ever-after bullcrap Hollywood ending. Naw, couldn't be. This stuff just doesn't happen in real life. Not to Negroes; and weren't we supposed to be keeping this one real?

Funk's bad breath was all up in Kalamu's face, but you know how  Big Mu can get when his mind is made up. Funk and Kalamu stood toe to toe for a minute, psychically parrying and thrusting retorts back and forth. Just looking at them, it didn't look like nothing was going on, but Kalamu was arguing with Funk the way authors do with their fictional characters, telling Funk, you don't like it you can just go head and write and direct your own story. But this is my project.

Funk, of course, shot back, naw, this ain't your story, this some bullshit trying to appeal to the women by putting men down cause a brother wasn't going to put up with somebody telling him it was wrong to feel the way he felt. Besides, Kalamu, you know good and well there ain't no happy endings for 99 out of a 100 Black couples.

Well, Funk, just call this: the one after ninety-nine. And with that Kalamu turned his back on Funk and called out: Make sure everybody has the revised script. The one with the Black ending.

Kalamu knew that no matter how consistently acquainted with sadness this society forced our people to be, love and laughter was what we intimately craved and would risk everything to achieve. Fourth and inches. The safe play was to punt. But without a second thought, they lined up with two wide receivers and everybody else blocking.

Funk reluctantly split behind the cameras, but staying nearby just in case one of them muffed it and Funk would be able to slip back in and put a real-ass ending on this bad boy.

 

 

 

SCENE FOUR.

 

—Is the crane ready for the overhead? This is the last scene, let's do it in one take. One smooth take. Tilt down as the crane goes up, zooming in as you rise. And Funk, back up, we're catching a bit of your shadow in the shot and we don't need that.

 

—Action.

 

Angela jumps up quickly but very quietly, she doesn't want to frighten him. Angela takes John's hand. Turns him around. He isn't crying. But his hand is shaking. She doesn't have to look in his eyes. She doesn't have to look period. Everything is bright, red bright, makes her close her eyes. She glances furtively at him before shutting her eyes.

John's eyes are open but he isn't observing anything outside of himself. During this brief moment, John's eyes are a double mirror: he is looking inward at himself (even though he appears to be standing with his eyes wide open staring straight ahead at the hanging ivy in the ceramic pot with the macramé tie that Angela had labored on during the four and three quarter month period the last time she wasn't "seeing" anybody) and at the same time, Angela catches her own reflection in the opaque blankness of John's stare.

Angela knows, with the unprovable certainty that those who believe in god possess, she just knows that at last, and also for the first time, somehow, John is deeply inspecting himself instead of questioning her motives when there is something he can't figure out. A pheasant, feathered the most dazzling green, flies across Angela's line of vision. She knows it has sprung from John's chest, free to fly the friendly skyways of her dream visions.

Angela instinctively starts chanting prayers of thanksgiving. Cognizant that she is near a threshold and wanting to remain on the path, Angela humbly and silently asks the creator for guidance. There is no sound and she thinks the silence is the answer.

"Don't do anything. Don't say anything. Just hold me."

After he held her, they talk for thirty-nine straight minutes. It is a start.

 

***

 

Today, it's one thousand, two hundred and forty-five days later. John and Angela are still together.

They laugh about this now.

 

—Cut! Ok, that's a wrap!

 

By then Funk, in a truly foul mood, had angrily put on his wrap-around shades and silently slithered off the set into the urban shadows.

 

###

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear  

 

 

 

GUARDING THE FLAME OF LIFE

The Funeral of Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr.

 

It was a summer day in December (1998). The sky was clear, high, an almost pastel blue dotted by mere wisps of clouds. The shine of the sun bounced beaming off the white of the church building facade. Coming around the corner, brother man pushed a blue shopping cart that held a yellow fifty gallon trash can with an ice pick stuck on the top perimeter of the plastic container. Dude had a fist full of dollar bills in his left hand. I knew what he was doing. He was selling beer.

 

"Yeah. Probably that old cheap Budweiser," my good buddy and internationally-exhibited visual artist Willie Birch wisecracked. About three-quarters of an hour later, the vendor had acquired a couple of cases of Lowenbrau in the bottle; had them stashed on the bottom rack of the grocery buggy now improvised into a moving beer kiosk.

 

I spied a man in brilliant yellow shirt -- it does injustice to the shirt to call it yellow, just as it does injustice to the sun to call it hot. The man was standing still, no breeze was blowing but his shirt looked like it was moving. The hue of the deeply mellow, vibrant yellow fabric was so intense that it made gold-dust jealous. Turns out, as we talk, the brother reminds me we graduated from high school together.

 

Then Roger Lewis, a founding member of the Dirty Dozen Band, walked up holding his baritone sax. New Orleans musicians have a tradition of resplendent cleanliness -- as in mean, clean and beautifying the scene. Roger's sartorial eminence was such that just the hipness of his presence was musical. He stood on the sidewalk with a slight rearward lean, angled just enough to let you know he was hip and not so much that he looked like he was posturing or calling undue attention to himself. I heard strange and wonderful melodies in his insouciant stance, a bluesy riff in the way he unhurriedly unfurled a slow smile when I walked up to congratulate him on maintaining impressively high standards of beauty vis-a-vis male attire.

 

But before the praise song to Roger was fully out of my mouth, nightclub bouncer and renown gospel singer Joe Cool strolled by in a righteously pressed walking suit. The trouser hem draped softly over the tops of a pair of mustard colored, burnished, kid-glove leather kicks that looked so comfortable he could have worn them on his hands -- as I dapped him I bent down and commented, "look at that," pointing with my chin to his lovely loafers, "leave it to you to give them something to look at when they bow down." Joe Cool has a beautiful grin when he is pleased.

 

Moments earlier, across the street I had seen our consigliori relaxing on the stoop next to one of Treme's most responsible business people (as they were incognito I will not divulge their 9-to-5 identities but I will say they were not visiting, this was their resident neighborhood and everyone who passed them spoke and were spoken to). The three of us were passing pleasantries for a minute when up pops union organizer and environmental racism activist Pat Bryant dress in a black suit, looking like a Baptist preacher. In response to my ribbing about his get-up Pat joked he had a Bible in his back pocket. With a straight face I asked, "what caliber?" He just smiled and showed us neither Bible nor gun. After giving me a conspiratorial glance, Pat said something to our mutual  counselor-friend about the low nature of lawyerly work. The attorney calmly parried, "Like Booker T. said, it beats working in the sun." Yeah, that made sense; we knowingly head nodded. Pat leaned toward the counselor to discuss a personal matter, I bid them adieu and re-crossed the street to the church.

 

Back standing next to Willie, I surveyed the scene. Shimmering and shimmying down the street a block away you could see the feathered form and also hear the drums of new style Mardi Gras Indian, Fi-Ya-Ya. The distance but distinct sound cut through the cacophony of the crowd. Seemed like there was a couple of hundred people milling around the St. Augustine's front entrance at the corner of Gov. Nichols and St. Claude.

 

Fi-Ya-Ya in all his Indian glory had his headgear on. The mask fitted over his head like a knight’s helmet, or like one of them old paper mache, black and white, skeleton skulls like, well, like community activist/professional agitator Randy Mitchell wore. Randy was belligerently waving a black, pirate-like flag and daring anyone to take a picture of his copyrighted costume.

 

As I turned to take in Fi-Ya-Ya's arrival, another advertisement for African inspired, colorful splendor stepped softly around the corner. A man whose face I recognized from secondline parades, strode confidently through the crowd, his head cocked upward like a rooster squinting at dawn sky. He had on a black pin striped suit, a blood red silk handkerchief gushed out of his breast pocket, and he was crowned with a white Stetson hat. His spotless skypiece had a small feather stuck in the side that made peacock feathers look dull. I ran up to him, "man, ain't no use in looking for the sun, cause you the only thing shining!" He waved at me good naturedly and laughed.

 

Earlier I had been inside the church for the musical tribute section but when the mass portion kicked in, the Indian drumming and chanting that was going on outside piqued my interest. Their sharp shouts and sounds that were unignorable as spear stabs periodically pierced the quiet of the church sanctuary. Seemed like the drums were calling me by name. And that’s how I came to be outside greeting a plethora of cultural stalwarts such as Greg Stafford, the Young Tuxedo Brass Band leader/trumpeter and founding member of the Black Men of Labor marching club. Greg was resplendent in white from head to toe, including a tall conical African-inspired headpiece.

 

While waiting for the body to be released from the church services many of us passed the time by greeting and hugging each other while reminiscing about good times and other great second lines. We were patient. Regardless of what was or was not going on inside, we knew Donald Harrison Sr. would be delivered over to us for a final procession to the burying ground.

 

(So far I have not talked about the women -- there were a couple of sisters so fine that when they strolled through the crowd, men stopped talking and just stood with their mouths gapped open. A little later when my wife Nia came outside and started hugging me as she leaned against my shoulder, Willie started babbling about how beautiful Nia was. With every syllable, Nia's smile got wider and wider. I know that the significance of this interlude of describing the beauty of the women is loss on some people, but at the risk of being misunderstood, I say to you that where ever there is no deep and profound appreciation of women and music, beauty and dance, in such absence you find a general pallor and dullness to existence, an existence that opulence and ostentatious sex only makes more sad. In any case, as clean as all the men were I described above, apply the splendor of their appearance to the pulchritude of the women.)

 

Inside the church Fr. LeDeaux had said, there is something in us that celebrates life, celebrates through "music and dancing." He said that: music and dancing. A Catholic priest conducting a mass lauds the centrality of “music and dancing” -- obviously this priest is a Black man (and I don't mean biologically, I mean culturally).

 

The church is decored with the usual artifacts of Christianity, but closer inspection reveals banners proclaiming the Nguzo Saba (the seven principles). Moreover, high up in the balcony, taking up the top wall, instead of a traditional cross there is what looks like a ten to fifteen foot ankh.

 

The ankh is a traditional African icon -- for those who would want me to specify that the ankh is Egyptian, I suggest that you miss the point that Egypt is African, or at least originally was before euro-centric scholars with cultural axes to grind kept trying to point to Greece to explain the science and culture of North Africa. Anyway, there, in St. Augustine Caholic church, the largest religious icon was an ankh.

 

The ankh represents not simply life in the abstract but also the male and female principle of life in balance. The shape of the ankh has the ovary over the phallus -- the circle (actually an upside down teardrop, the pear shape of the earth itself), or female, sits atop, the rod, or male.

 

Also, unlike most churches which have the pulpit at one end of the church, in St. Augustine the altar is in the middle of the congregational seating and what had originally been the dais and choir area was now where the musicians performed.

 

Need I tell you that this is a Black church? St. Augustine Catholic church is one of the oldest churches in the city and was build based on money raised by “gens libre de colouer” -- free men of color -- and by contributions from enslaved Africans who made money from trade and handicraft sales. Moreover, St. Augustine is located in Treme, which is the oldest continuously existing African American neighborhood in the United States.

 

For an hour before the formal funeral mass, there had been jazz and Mardi Gras Indian drumming, dancing and singing. Trap drummer Shannon Powell and djembe master Luther Gray traded funky pre-funeral licks. Bassist Chris Severin held down the bottom. Milton Batiste bested the younger trumpeters with some absolutely, hideously awe-inspiring trumpet flourishes that favored all the tones that hang around and in between but never at the center of the tempered scale -- although, I must say that “Twelve” (aka James Andrews, bka Satchmo of the Ghetto) was right up under Milton with some trumpet wah-wah effects he made by sticking his hand in and over the bell of his horn as if his flesh were a rubber or metal mute. The two Willies (Willie Tee and Willie Metcalf) played the keyboards like balaphons, that uniquely African mixture of melody and percussion. And only son, Donald Harrison Jr. was out front with saxophone -- he was on alto, his prettiest voice. And there were plenty more hornmen and drummers coming and going, including the ever effervescent vocalist/trumpeter Kermit Ruffins.

 

At the end of the musical tribute section I was called on to deliver a poem. I recited “Spirit & Flame.” Much of what I said was chanted, some was not even in English but, nevertheless and unfailingly, most of the people understood every sound I uttered.

 

On one side of the church sat All For One Records founder and former musical director for Sonny & Cher, Harold Battiste dressed in a formal length, black, white-embroidered top of African finery; his elderhood sagely complemented by the upside down halo of his magnificent white wisdom-beard. No one has made as significant an all-around contribution to New Orleans music as has Battiste who is prolific producer, composer and arranger in jazz, rhythm & blues, gospel, and pop music.

 

On the other side of the church, the Big Chief of the Yellow Pochohantas and a man who has masked for over fifty years, Tootie Montana and his wife and chief sewing partner, Joyce Montana sat side by side. They could wear sackcloth and look regal. Throughout the services people walked up to Big Chief Tootie and paid almost as much respects to him as to the Harrison family. Though Donald Harrison Sr. was widely acclaimed for his intellectual prowess and historical insight into the significance of Indian culture, Tootie Montana is considered the most accomplished Mardi Gras Indian suit designer.

 

After my threnody, members of Chief Harrison’s gang shake tambourines and sing over the coffin, offering a last testament of fidelity to the principles and beliefs of their Big Chief. Also on hand to pay their respects were a number of other Indian chiefs, including some who are from rival uptown gangs.

 

A veritable who’s who of Black street culture slow marches up and down the church aisle for the last viewing of a man, who perhaps more than any other, argued for full recognition of the cultural significance of Mardi Gras Indians -- a calling which significantly his children and grandchildren have actively taken up. His oldest daughter Cherice Harrison-Nelson teaches Mardi Gras Indian culture in the public schools and in community workshops. His son, Donald Harrison Jr. is a professional jazz musician who has constantly records Mardi Gras Indian music and his grandson Brian Nelson has become a Mardi Gras Indian chief. Though, thankfully, his work continues on, undoubtedly Donald Harrison Sr. will be missed.

 

These services are unlike Catholic funeral services anywhere on this continent. The presiding priest both sings and preaches as legendary blind pianist Henry Butler plays in accompaniment. A trio of women read scripture. The highpoint is Donald Harrison’s instrumental rendition of Amazing Grace. Predictably, this is truly a memorable New Orleans funeral.

 

Unfortunately, but also predictably, there were too many cameras (a couple of photographers had been requested by the family, but most were uninvited). Used to be you would only see the small, hand-held deals, now there are camcorders and video crews with ungainly boom cranes and artificial lights. All of this despite two big signs posted on the church's front door "no camera's inside."

 

Most of the picture taking was futile. No matter what they shot with, none of those pictures could show you the spirit swirling around this gathering for the send off of Big Chief Donald Harrison, the Guardian of the Flame. Only the human soul can appreciate the profoundness of the spirit. A machine at best captures but a pale reflection. If you really want to make a memento of such moments, you should go and osmose the spirit through your pores, inhale the bouquet of real emotions and deep sentiments.

 

After over an hour of church services, the second line finally began. For a block or so, I slipped inside the eye of the procession, pranced just behind the trombones, saxophones at my side and trumpets nappying up my kitchen with corkscrew tones blown at the back of my head. We proceeded up Ursulines past where James Black used to live (I believe it was his mama's house), where, when brother Black had passed on, the hearse stopped in front the door and the coffin was pulled out and literally thrown up in the air in ritual salute.

 

Earlier I had hovered at the heart of Indian drumming and chants as we prayed in our own secular way for Big Chief Donald Harrison’s safe journey to the ancestor realm. I am not an Indian nor a musician, but these are my people. I was here to bear witness with the vibrancy of my being, with my tongue chanting and body dancing, with my soul intertwined in celebratory resistance shout with all the others of us all in the street -- no building, no structure, no coffin, nothing could contain us. This is why we don't die, we multiply. Every time the butcher cuts one of us down, the rest of us laugh and dance, defying death. It's our way of saying yes to life, saying fuck you to death and his nefarious henchmen, poverty and racism.

 

The funeral of Big Chief Donald Harrison raises two important questions. First, when does spectacle overtake ritual and, second, in light of the significance of the transition of this particular Big Chief, where do we go from here?

 

From the beginning in Congo Square on down to the jazz funeral of today, there have always been two kinds of audiences: those of the culture who came to make ritual, to affirm and renew; and those who came to witness (a few to gawk) and be entertained. Both audiences understood something powerful was going on, which is why they both were there/are here.

 

The ritual participants came, some literally looking like they wore whatever they had worn to work yesterday or maybe even whatever they had worn when they fell asleep slumped over a bar table at three o'clock this morning; or, then again, they came like that fierce sister who wore a circular feathered, multicolored hat about which to say it looked like a crown belittles the splendiferous figure she cut every time she bobbed her head, don't mention when she would turn and smile.

 

The ritual participants were the beaters of wine bottles and the bearers of babies on their hips. They were those who raided deep into the hearts of their closets to come out with their hippest threads and they were those who just heard the commotion, threw open their front doors, rose up off stoops and porches, and ran to add to the assembly because in the marrow of their being they “feel to believe” they are “called” to join in. These often nameless and generally uncelebrated (outside of their turf communities), these indispensable spiritual emeralds are the standard bearers of street culture. They came.

 

These are the ones who would have been dancers and not just onlookers in Congo Square -- the musicians, the singers, the hip swingers, hollering until hoarse, and then shouting some more. These are the people whose existence in and of itself affirms the dynamic of the African way of knowing and celebrating life.

 

The others, the onlookers were there to be touched by the profundity of the ritual -- and while they are welcome to watch, we must understand that no matter what they think of what they see (or what they write or how many pictures they print up and put in books), the onlookers are an appendage and ultimately not even necessary for the functioning of this culture.

 

Sometimes there are clashes between these two audiences, sometimes there are mergers. These two groups of people are connected in time and place, but are separate in culture and condition. Harrison's funeral makes me pause and ask: when does the spectacle of it, when does the gathering of onlookers, gawkers (especially the wanna-be sly cultural vultures -- and you know who you are), when does this press of outsiders become so critical that they color, no, they mar the beauty and integrity of the proceedings?

 

It wouldn't be so bad, if the non dancers would step to the rear and sit quietly or move out the way, and walk on the sidewalk, but no, some of them are so bold as to want to be up front and personal. And please do not misunderstand this as a veiled referenced exclusively to so-called "white" people. There are a number of Negroes who show through and come back into the hood only when someone dies, and then only for a moment -- don't blink your eyes or you will miss them. Like Dorothy, sometimes I wish I could click my heels and make all of them go away. Forever.

 

African American culture has always had to function under the scrutiny of outsiders, however, the mix is becoming so disproportionate that you can’t hardly feel the heat of the Black fyah because of the damp of so much chilly water.

 

Sometimes Donald Harrison (both Donald the father and Donald the son) and I would talk about these and other matters.  In fact, more and more the nature and preservation of our culture is becoming one of the major topics of conversation wherever the culture bearers gather. Regardless of whether we are misunderstood, there are a significant number of us who will never liquidate our Blackness to indulge in indiscriminate integration, particularly integration of all things Black into anything White. Donald Harrison Sr. could hold court for days about this.

 

Big Chief Harrison was a studious man, who read voraciously, and thought deeply about being and the meaning of life. I shall not attempt to put words in his mouth, nor to project my own sentiments through him. We need only tell the truth about him. We need only note that he gave name to the "Guardian of the Flame."

 

What fyah was it that he wanted to keep burning?

 

The people outside the church was sparking like flint stones clacking against the hard rocks of our place and time. Mayor Marc Morial was inside expressing condolences. Outside Ferdinand Bigard had dressed his son in a Friday night, negroidal-red Indian suit. Donald Harrison, Sr.'s body was resting inside the coffin inside the church. Outside Indians were scurrying back and forth, chanting in the street. The fire was outside -- also inside to a significant degree, but mainly outside -- in the hearts and soul of the people who sang and danced during the musical tribute and retreated to the street to wait out the formal religious part of the funeral.

 

People do not want to talk about this cultural separation of church and street, especially since the street is the more celebrated. Perhaps, such celebratory discourse sounds sacrilegious and most of us who write and publish in mainstream organs are either Christians or are very reluctant to do anything that might be construed as anti-Christian, but facts is facts. Those who maintain the street culture of New Orleans are mainly blues people who are often very spiritual but who are not necessarily very religious.

 

Yet, the street folk don’t deny the church it’s place in the community. A significant section of the Black community goes to church, and most Black people, be they Christian or not, believe in “God,” but spiritual beliefs on one hand and strict adherence to Christian doctrine on the other are two different concepts. This African-based spirituality sans Christian religiosity is the difference which demarcates the Black blues people from their fellow Blacks in the community. Moreover, the blues people are generally the marginals of society, the most impoverished materially, but, at the same time, they are the richest in terms of cultural creativity and integrity, and particularly in terms of African retentions (both conscious and unconscious).

 

New Orleans would be a piss poor place to live were it not for the presence and culture of the Black poor/blues people of New Orleans. The people who don't own a pot to urinate in nor a window to throw it out of (over sixty percent of them are renters!), these are the people whom Donald Harrison spoke of, with and for. These were the people who marched with him on Mardi Gras day. These and another element: the conscious brothers and sisters, kin and kind, who might work at City Hall or for the School Board but who dress out at appropriate occasions and shake their backfields like a saucer of Jello in the hands of a four year old. It is the poor and the conscious elements who align themselves with the poor who keep New Orleans Black culture alive -- the ones who will dance at the drop of a hat and can't imagine life without music.

 

This is what Donald Harrison asked us to keep alive, and this mission speaks directly to the second question: where do we go from here?

 

The best way to preserve New Orleans culture is to support the people who make the culture. Open doors for them. If you live or work in the big house, then throw food and resources out the window, pass on strategic information. But do it as a religious offering not as a material acquisition or purchase. Make your sacrifice and then go home. Let the spirit carry on. Let those who make music and dance, those who sing and chant, let them be and do what they gotta do without the interference of outsiders of whatever color who have a vested interest in becoming experts on what they have never and can never produce: a culture as vibrant and exultant as New Orleans street culture.

 

There is room for all at the table, but if you can't cook, get out the kitchen. Make whatever contribution you can and where you can't, get out the way and give the dancers room to do their thing.

 

Whether onlooker or participant, the passing of Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr. speaks to us, encourages us, cajoles us -- we must carry on: support New Orleans culture. Guard the Flame with the seriousness of your life, because that is precisely what the flame is: life. The flame is all about the joy and celebration of life. Be a guardian of life. Regardless of how cold it does or does not get, let the fyah burn full up!

 

—Kalamu ya Salaam

 

___________________

 

SPIRIT & FLAME

(for Big Chief Donald Harrison)

 

            you think this a costume?

            you think this a ball?

            you think this a lark?

            just for the fun of it all?

 

            Hoo Nan Ney!

 

the ancestors are enriched / our lives had been made stronger / the flame has purified us / if only / for a moment / the moment / of his flashing / his flaming / his wit / his anger / his upholdance of the legacy / of resistance / intelligence / seriousness / sun seriousness / hot pepper / cayenne colors / the shout of life in the face of whatever / the cultural tourists are calling themselves today / they / will be at the funeral / but who marched with him / when he was alive / who carried the flame / in their mouths / stepped in the sun then / when / no cameras were allowed / who waved hard high / the banner in their hearts / what men and women / sons, daughters / & lovers / who manifested / the dance walk of black shine / guarding the flame of our time / beaconing  bright / terrible / and badder than that / on our good days / in our wild ways / when nobody can't tell us nothing / not a goddamn thing / and we sing / and we shout / and we act out / black & red / african culture / of many colors / don't take no trail of tears to his coffin / donald harrison does not need your pity / your moans / about what we gon / do / now that he gone / the fire is not out / if you continue to carry the flame / if your are guardian / if you are in the groove / conscious of who / & what  we are / & all we come from / don't cry / don't you moan / stand tall / walk proud / let every waist wind up / let every foot kick forward / let every mouth shout / let every eye shine / don't bow down / go forth unbended / don't bow down / in sorry sorrow / you never saw him sad / as a negro / hoping to become white / by committing cultural suicide / he said feed the fire / keep the burning /grab some knowledge / be a scholar / know yourselves / honor your mother / honor your father / love your people / all they been / and had to be / while working through the slaughter / moving forward / keep on dancing / beat the drum / the drums of life / sing the songs / of who we are / follow his example / don't bow down / stand up straight / and guard the flame / the dark flame / of black fire / black fyah i tell you / fyah / & flame the spirit of struggle / spirit & flame / big chief / donald harrison / fayh chief / guardian / guardian of the flame / guardian of the flame / be a guardian / of the flame / the flame of life / shine on

 

—Kalamu ya Salaam 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

Flying Over America

 

                        i'm flying home

                       flying, flying, flying, flying

                             flying home

 

 

this, ancient land was once

not unified but free to be

whatever the sun shone upon

not furrowed by industry

nor ribboned by concrete

but simply a life path

trod by bare and moccasined feet

 

now from coast to coast,

from great lakes to gulf

there is the mechanical roar of engines

the boom of bombs

the staccato stutter of hand guns

the quiet binary clicking of computers, and

the tortured cry of nature writhing

twisted by modernity

 

i am an african encased in aviated metal

surrounded by the sad contentment

of civilized progress anxious to maintain

its hegemony of coercion

as we fly forward into the future

unmindful of the feces we leave behind

 

intermittently dozing i dream

of appreciating the simple silence

of a heavy metal epoch rusting to dust

of meditating in the amber

of a muted spangled banner song

 

this land we jet across was ancient once

and though i know we can never again

atavistically return home

into a nostalgic past, still i long

to see this soil be ancient once more

 

unmolested

by a social order so unrepentant

in its disdain

for the womb

of our earthly environment

that only its death

can justify the manifest destiny

of this nation's existence

 

only death

can possibly cover the debt &

repay the cost of creating

this hubristic nation state

which so wantonly & methodically murdered red,

so avariciously & cruelly enslaved black

 

if this is truly one nation under god

then surely their god must be a devil

 

 

—by kalamu ya salaam